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Comment by fisherjeff | Hacker News Reader

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fisherjeff·

“It can reach speeds of more than 68 kilometers per hour, and can fly more than 75 kilometers before recharging.”

So groundbreaking flight time is... one hour?

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The subtitle of the article is:

> The US-1, from Impossible Aerospace, can fly for 2 hours

If the drones goes at full speed, it loses more energy due to increased fiction with air and between mechanical parts. So, it reaches neither maximum flight time nor maximum flight range. The optimal speed to reach 75km is probably smaller.

they say multiple times that drones only regularly do 20-25 mins

While true, groundbreaking should usually mean "order(s) of magnitude" improvement.

It would have been more adequate if, say, the drone could last a day. Which would roughly be a 10x improvement.

Doubling flight time is a huge improvement and could be considered groundbreaking as usually you get incremental improvements of 10-15% a year because of improving battery tech.

Racing drones only ~3 minutes, barely enough to finish a single race (a few laps around the course). And battery is sometimes the limiting factor in races, where pilots have to slow down just so they are able to finish the course and not drop out of the sky before the race ends. Small FPV acrobatic drones fare not much better, 4-5 minutes at the most if you don't fly too aggressively.

The DJI Mavic 2 can stay up for about 30 minutes, according to the manufacturer.

But a racing drone have to be agile. If you put heavy batteries on the extremeties of the drone, it won't be able to roll or rotate very fast. It also takes more energy to fly faster and with more weight.

More specifically, they mean multirotors. Fixed wing aircraft can last much longer. 45 minutes is typical and hours is doable if you have the wingspan and the batteries.

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